Social Media

Catching Up With Renkoo - Evite 2.0

Mashable mentioned the launch of Renkoo before Christmas. This week, guest writer Kristen Nicole caught up with Renkoo founders Joyce Parkand Adam Rifkin in an interview.

Renkoo is a new social network that paves a better way for connecting with the friends you already have. In beta mode since early April, its public launch last Thursday has brought much attention from the press as its revolutionary use of Comet, an enhanced form of Ajax, is hailed by the tech community for its ability to better the social realms of web 2.0 culture.

Joyce Park, a former senior web developer at Friendster, and Adam Rifkin of KnowNow.com began to brainstorm about Renkoo in the wake of the dot com bust. Once the outcropping of social networks became the most prevalent form of interaction on the web, Park noted that “at the time a lot of people were thinking that social networking is cool, but we wondered ‘what is it really going to be used for?’” Well, for the extremely social people that have a difficult enough time keeping their work schedules organized, let alone finding a good time to simply meet up with friends. Casual outings are a part of our everyday lives, and instead of spending erroneous time on the phone or in your email inbox, Renkoo automates, simplifies, and congregates the most vital aspects of arranging a get together, and those are the people involved.

The concept is simple. Use Renkoo to begin the organization of a gathering. Invite the people you want to see there. If they haven’t signed up for Renkoo, they are enrolled. Now that you have everybody together, you can reach a consensus on when you’ll meet. The conversation is fed to you in various formats that you can choose from, so you can participate via your instant messenger, email, SMS or on Renkoo. Their Comet technology enables Renkoo to allow two-way, real time communication for all that are taking part in the discussion. If someone isn’t logged in, the conversation will be displayed in full the next time they go to their Renkoo account.

This may sound a bit complicated for some, even in its simplicity. This is in large part due to the new type of communication that Renkoo’s service permits. Some users may be slightly uncomfortable at first, solely because it’s something they are not accustomed to. This proved to be one of the challenges Park and Rifkin faced when experimenting their site while in beta mode.

Another challenge the makers of Renkoo faced are extremely important for a social site such as theirs, especially since it is designed for those that are looking to spend more time with people they are already close to. “One of the things that gets forgotten in the whole web 2.0 world is that even if it’s possible in the technical world, we may not want to do it in the real world,” Joyce remarked in our interview. What Park means by this is that her team learned early on that replicating the natural way in which people interact in real life is a good guideline for how Renkoo should be arranged. For example, the events created by users on Renkoo were initially public, as this is the standard for established sites such as Evite. Yet the Renkoo team found that this wasn’t the optimal way to go about smaller event planning. “We made a conscious decision…that events should be, by default, private, and that seems to be working out very well,” Rifkin mentioned during the same interview.

A driving force for the continued improvement of Renkoo during their nearly year-long beta testing mode was the reality that people are passionate about social networking. So for a network founded on developing existing intimate relationships with friends to be anything less than genuine and usable was unacceptable for the well-seasoned Park and Rifkin. “The kind of software we make is about people that you already know and love and want to spend time with. You don’t want to look bad in front of your friends,” Park says as a testament to the degree of personal and professional effort she put into the development of Renkoo. And it shows. Renkoo, named as a derivation of a form of Japanese poetry called renku, is a collaborative composition from friends sitting together, each giving a verse to cultivate the collective piece of art.

Editor's Note: Mashable HQ is offline today, so expect little or no posting. Also check out Mashable's recent reviews of Renkoo competitors Vibely, MingleNow, HeyLetsGo, ILCU and all the companies nominated for events category of the Social Networking Awards.

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